I created 100% procedural grass using Blender for a book cover recently, and while it didn't have nearly the attention to detail you see in places like Pixar films, the effect was just right for the author's work. I would add that (at least semi-real) shadows are really important for improving the quality of any grass texture.
Thank you! (I'm the author of the post.) I am indeed writing my own code; I'm just using simple functions from Processing.
Thank you very much for the video link. It occurred to me while working on this that video game artists and animators probably do a ton of this, and have much more sophisticated models. Indeed, the result from that video is really, really good. I'm coming from a painting and abstract background. This was my first real exercise in studying natural patterns and textures through algorithmic artwork. I mostly intend to apply it to abstract artwork, but the more realistic approach shown in the video is a different, interesting angle on the same subject.
I'm using Quil, which is a Clojure wrapper for Processing. The source is quite dense, so it's hard to understand without following the post. It's mostly about tweaking probability distributions along gradients.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eshOzshjt90
I created 100% procedural grass using Blender for a book cover recently, and while it didn't have nearly the attention to detail you see in places like Pixar films, the effect was just right for the author's work. I would add that (at least semi-real) shadows are really important for improving the quality of any grass texture.